by Bellow, Saul
“Are you sure that Fonstein isn’t listed in the directory?”
No, I wasn’t sure, was I? I hadn’t looked. That was just like me, wasn’t it? “I assumed the rabbi had_ looked,” I said. “I feel chastened. I shouldn’t have taken the man’s word for it. He_ should have looked. I took it for granted. You’re probably right.”
“If I can be of further use…?”
By pointing out how he would have gone about finding Fonstein, Swerdlow showed me how lopsided I was. Sure it was stupid of me not to look in the phone directory. Smart, smart, but a dope, as the old people used to say. For the Fonsteins were_ listed. Information gave me their number. There they were, as accessible as millions of others, in small print, row on row on row, the endless listings.
I dialed the Fonsteins, braced for a conversation—my opening words prepared, my excuses for neglecting them made with warmth, just such warmth as I actually felt. Should they be inclined to blame me—well, I was to blame.
But they were out, or had unplugged their line. Elderly people, they probably turned in early. After a dozen rings, I gave up and went to bed myself. And when I got into bed—without too much fear of being alone in this huge place, not that there aren’t plenty of murdering housebreakers in the city—I picked up a book, preparing to settle in for a long read.
Deirdre’s bedside books had now become mine. I was curious to know how she had read herself to sleep. What had been on her mind became important to me. In her last years she had turned to such books as _Korщ Kosmu,__ the Hermetica_ published by Oxford, and also selections from the Zohar. Like the heroine of Poe’s story “Morella.” Odd that Deirdre had said so little about it. She was not a secretive lady, but like many others she kept her own counsel in matters of thought and religion. I loved to see her absorbed in a book, mummied up on her side of the antique bed, perfectly still under the covers. A pair of lamps on each side were like bronze thornbushes. I was always after Deirdre to get sensible reading lights. Nothing could persuade her—she was obstinate when her taste was challenged—and three years after she passed away I was still shopping: Those sculpture brambles never will be replaced.
Some men fall asleep on the sofa after dinner. This often results in insomnia, and as I hate to be up in the night, my routine is to read in bed until midnight, concentrating on passages marked by Deirdre and on her notes at the back of the book. It has become one of my sentimental rituals.
But on this night I passed out after a few sentences, and presently I began to dream.
There is great variety in my dreams. My nights are often busy. I have anxious dreams, amusing dreams, desire dreams, symbolic dreams. There are, however, dreams that are all business and go straight to the point. I suppose we have the dreams we deserve, and they may even be prepared in secret.
Without preliminaries, I found myself in a hole. Night, a dark plain, a pit, and from the start I was already trying to climb out. In fact, I had been working at it for some time. This was a dug hole, not a grave but a trap prepared for me by somebody who knew me well enough to anticipate that I would fall in. I could see over the edge, but I couldn’t crawl out because my legs were tangled and caught in ropes or roots. I was clawing at the dirt for something I could grip. I had to rely on my arms. If I could hoist myself onto the edge, I might free the lower body. Only, I was already exhausted, winded, and if I did manage to pull myself out, I’d be too beat to fight. My struggles were watched by the person who had planned this for me. I could see his boots. Down the way, in a similar ditch, another man was also wearing himself out. He wasn’t going to make it either. Despair was not principally what I felt, nor fear of death. What made the dream terrible was my complete conviction of error, my miscalculation of strength, and the recognition that my forces were drained to the bottom. The whole structure was knocked flat. There wasn’t a muscle in me that I hadn’t called on, and for the first time I was aware of them all, down to the tiniest, and the best they could do was not enough. I couldn’t call on myself, couldn’t meet the demand, couldn’t put out. There’s no reason why I should ask you to feel this with me, and I won’t blame you for avoiding it; I’ve done that myself. I always avoid extremes, even during sleep. Besides, we all recognize the burden of my dream: Life so diverse, the Grand Masquerade of Mortality shriveling to a hole in the ground. Still, that did not exhaust the sense of the dream, and the remainder is essential to the interpretation of what I’ve set down about Fonstein, Sorella, or Billy even. I couldn’t otherwise have described it. It isn’t so much a dream as a communication. I was being shown—and I was aware of this in sleep—that I had made a mistake, a lifelong mistake: something wrong, false, now fully manifest.
Revelations in old age can shatter everything you’ve put in place from the beginning—all the wiliness of a lifetime of expertise and labor, interpreting and reinterpreting in patching your fortified delusions, the work of the swarm of your defensive shock troops, which will go on throwing up more perverse (or insane) barriers. All this is bypassed in a dream like this one. When you have one of these, all you can do is bow to the inevitable conclusions.
Your imagination of strength is connected to your apprehensions of brutality, where that brutality is fully manifested or absolute. Mine is a New World version of reality—granting me the presumption that there is anything real about it. In the New World, your strength doesn’t_ give out. That was the reason why your European parents, your old people, fed you so well in this land of youth. They were trained in submission, but you were free and bred in liberty. You were equal, you were strong, and here you could not be put to death, as Jews there_ had been.
But your soul brought the truth to you so forcibly that you woke up in your fifty-fifty bed—half Jewish, half Wasp—since, thanks to the powers of memory, you were the owner of a Philadelphia mansion (too disproportionate a reward), and there the dream had just come to a stop. An old man resuming ordinary consciousness opened his still-frightened eyes and saw the bronze brier-bush lamp with bulbs glowing in it. His neck on two pillows, stacked for reading, was curved like a shepherd’s crook.
It wasn’t the dream alone that was so frightful, though that was bad enough; it was the accompanying revelation that was so hard to take. It wasn’t death that had scared me, it was disclosure: I wasn’t what I thought I was. I really didn’t understand merciless brutality. And whom should I take this up with now? Deirdre was gone; I can’t discuss things like this with my son—he’s all administrator and executive. That left Fonstein and Sorella. Perhaps.
Sorella had said, I recall, that Fonstein, in his orthopedic boot, couldn’t vault over walls and escape like Douglas Fairbanks. In the movies, Douglas Fairbanks was always too much for his enemies. They couldn’t hold him. In The Black Pirate_ he disabled a sailing vessel all by himself. Holding a knife, he slid down the mainsail, slicing it in half. You couldn’t have locked a man like that in a cattle car; he would have broken out. Sorella wasn’t speaking of Douglas Fairbanks, nor did she refer to Fonstein only. Her remark was ultimately meant for me. Yes, she was talking of me and also of Billy Rose. For Fonstein was Fonstein—he was Mitteleuropa. I, on the other hand, was from the Eastern Seaboard—born in New Jersey, educated at Washington Square College, a big mnemonic success in Philadelphia. I was a Jew of an entirely different breed. And therefore (yes, go on, you can’t avoid it now) closer to Billy Rose and his rescue operation, the personal underground inspired by The Scarlet Pimpernel_—the Hollywood of Leslie Howard, who acted the Pimpernel, substituted for the Hollywood of Douglas Fairbanks. There was no way, therefore, in which I could grasp the real facts in the case of Fonstein. I hadn’t understood Fonstein_ v. Rose,_ and I badly wanted to say this to Harry and Sorella. You pay a price for being a child of the New World.
I decided to switch off the lamp, which, fleetingly, was associated with the thicket in which Abraham-avinu_ had found a ram caught by the horns—as you see, I was bombarded from too many sides. Now illuminated particles of Jewish history wer
e coming at me.
An old man has had a lifetime to learn to control his jitters in the night. Whatever I was (and that, at this late stage, still remained to be seen), I would need strength in the morning to continue my investigation. So I had to take measures to avoid a fretful night. Great souls may welcome insomnia and are happy to think of God or Science in the dead of night, but I was too disturbed to think straight. An important teaching of the Mnemosyne System, however, is to learn to make your mind a blank. You will yourself to think nothing. You expel all the distractions. Tonight’s distractions happened to be very serious. I had discovered for how long I had shielded myself from unbearable imaginations—no, not imaginations, but recognitions—of murder, of relish in torture, of the ground bass of brutality, without which no human music ever is performed.
So I applied my famous method. I willed myself to think nothing. I shut out all thoughts. When you think nothing, consciousness is driven out. Consciousness being gone, you are asleep.
I conked out. It was a mercy.
In the morning, I found myself being supernormal. At the bathroom sink I rinsed my mouth, for it was parched (the elderly often suffer from such dryness). Shaved and brushed, I exercised on my ski machine (mustn’t let the muscles go slack) and then I dressed and, when dressed, stuck my shoes under the revolving brush. Once more in rightful possession of a fine house, where Francis X. Biddle was once a neighbor and Emily Dickinson a guest at tea (there were other personages to list), I went down to breakfast. My housekeeper came from the kitchen with granola, strawberries, and black coffee. First the coffee, more than the usual morning fix.
“How did you sleep?” said Sarah, my old-fashioned caretaker. So much discretion, discernment, wisdom of life rolled up in this portly black lady. We didn’t communicate in words, but we tacitly exchanged information at a fairly advanced level. From the amount of coffee I swallowed she could tell that I was shamming supernormalcy. From my side, I was aware that possibly I was crediting Sarah with very wide powers because I missed my wife, missed contact with womanly intelligence. I recognized also that I had begun to place my hopes and needs on Sorella Fonstein, whom I now was longing to see. My mind persisted in placing the Fonsteins in Sarasota, in winter quarters with the descendants of Hannibal’s elephants, amid palm trees and hibiscus. An idealized Sarasota, where my heart apparently was yearning ever.
Sarah put more coffee before me in my study. Probably new lines had appeared in my face overnight—signs indicating the demolition of a long-standing structure. (How could_ I have been such a creep!)
At last my Fonstein call was answered—I was phoning on the half hour.
A young man spoke. “Hello, who is this?”
How clever of Swerdlow to suggest trying the old listed number.
“Is this the Fonstein residence?”
“That’s what it is.”
“Would you be Gilbert Fonstein, the son?”
“I would not,” the young person said, breezy but amiable. He was, as they say, laid back. No suggestion that I was deranging him (Sorella entered into this—she liked to make bilingual puns). “I’m a friend of Gilbert’s, house-sitting here. Walk the dog, water the plants, set the timed lights. And who are you?”
“An old relative—friend of the family. I see that I’ll have to leave a message. Tell them that it has to do with another Fonstein who lives in Jerusalem and claims to be an uncle or cousin to Harry. I had a call from a rabbi—X/Y—who feels that something should be done, since the old guy is off the wall.”
“In what way?”
“He’s eccentric, deteriorated, prophetic, psychopathic. A decaying old man, but he’s still ebullient and full of protest….”
I paused briefly. You never can tell whom you’re talking to, seen or unseen. What’s more, I am one of those suggestible types, apt to take my cue from the other fellow and fall into his style of speech. I detected a certain freewheeling charm in the boy at the other end, and there was an exchange of charm for charm. Evidently I wanted to engage this young fellow’s interest. In short, to imitate, to hit it off and get facts from him.
‘This old Jerusalem character says he’s a Fonstein and wants money?” he said. “You sound as if you yourself were in a position to help, so why not wire money.”
“True. However, Harry could identify him, check his credentials, and naturally would want to hear that he’s turned up alive. He may have been on the dead list. Are you only a house-sitter? You sound like a friend of the family.”
“I see we’re going to have a talk. Hold a minute while I find my bandanna. It’s starting to be allergy time, and my whole head is raw…. Which relative are you?”
“I run an institute in Philadelphia.”
“Oh, the memory man. I’ve heard of you. You go back to the time of Billy Rose—that_ flake. Harry disliked talking about it, but Sorella and Gilbert often did…. Can you hold on till I locate the handkerchief? Wiping my beard with Kleenex leaves crumbs of paper.”
When he laid down the phone, I used the pause to place him plausibly. I formed an image of a heavy young man—a thick head of hair, a beer paunch, a T-shirt with a logo or slogan. Act Up_ was now a popular one. I pictured a representative member of the youth population seen on every street in every section of the country and even in the smallest of towns. Rough boots, stone-washed jeans, bristly cheeks—something like Leadville or Silverado miners of the last century, except that these young people were not laboring, never would labor with picks. It must have diverted him to chat me up. An old gent in Philadelphia, moderately famous and worth lots of money. He couldn’t have imagined the mansion, the splendid room where I sat holding the French phone, expensively rewired, an instrument once the property of a descendant of the Merovingian nobility. (I wouldn’t give up on the Baron Charlus.)
The young man was not a hang-loose, hippie handyman untroubled by intelligence, whatever else. I was certain of that. He had much to tell me. Whether he was malicious I had no way of saying. He was manipulative, however, and he had already succeeded in setting the tone of our exchange. Finally, he had information about the Fonsteins, and it was information I wanted.
“I do go back a long way,” I said. “I’ve been out of touch with the Fonsteins for too many years. How have they arranged their retirement? Do they divide their year between New Jersey and a warm climate? Somehow I fancy them in Sarasota.”
“You need a new astrologer.”
He wasn’t being satirical—protective rather. He now treated me like a senior citizen. He gentled me.
“I was surprised lately when I reckoned up the dates and realized the Fonsteins and I last met about thirty years ago, in Jerusalem. But emotionally I was in contact—that does happen.” I tried to persuade him, and I felt in reality that it was true.
Curiously, he agreed. “It would make a dissertation subject,” he said. “Out of sight isn’t necessarily out of mind. People withdraw into themselves, and then they work up imaginary affections. It’s a common American condition.”
“Because of the continental U. S. A.—the terrific distances?”
“Pennsylvania and New Jersey are neighboring states.”
“I do seem to have closed out New Jersey mentally,” I admitted. “You sound as though you have studied…?”
“Gilbert and I were at school together.”
“Didn’t he do physics at Cal Tech?”
“He switched to mathematics—probability theory.”
“There I’m totally ignorant.”
“That makes two of us,” he said, adding, “I find you kind of interesting to talk to.”
“One is always looking for someone to have a real exchange with.”
He seemed to agree. He said, “I’m inclined to make the time for it, whenever possible.”
He had described himself as a house-sitter, without mentioning another occupation. In a sense I was a house-sitter myself, notwithstanding that I owned the property. My son and his wife may also have seen me in s
uch a light. A nice corollary was that my soul played the role of sitter in my body.
It did in fact cross my mind that the young man wasn’t altogether disinterested. That I was undergoing an examination or evaluation. So far, he had told me nothing about the Fonsteins except that they didn’t winter in Sarasota and that Gilbert had studied mathematics. He didn’t say that he himself had attended Cal Tech. And when he said that out of sight wasn’t invariably out of mind, I thought his dissertation, if he had written one, might have been in the field of psychology or sociology.
I recognized that I was half afraid of asking direct questions about the Fonsteins. By neglecting them, I had compromised my right to ask freely. There were things I did and did not want to hear. The house-sitter sensed this, it amused him, and he led me on. He was light and made sporty talk, but I began to feel there was a grim side to him.
I decided that it was time to speak up, and I said, “Where can I reach Harry and Sorella, or is there a reason you can’t give out their number?”
“I haven’t got one.”
“Please don’t talk riddles.”
“They can’t be reached.”
